II. The Emergence Of Lead Users Part of the emergence of 'mass amateurization' and 'Pro-Am' is the discovery of the role of Lead Users, which have been studied by Erik von Hippel in his landmark book, Democratizing Innovation.53 Von Hippel writes: “Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents.” 54 And, as Janet Hope concludes, “The user innovation literature points to empirical evidence that users, rather than manufacturers, are in fact the primary innovators in many contexts.”55 Some of the better known examples of user innovated products are email the mountain bike, sports bra, desktop publishing, Gatorade, and white-out liquid. Von Hippel mentions the important aspect that “3M products based on lead users, are 8 times higher sales than market research driven innovations.56 Lead users are users with a high incentive to solve problems, and that often develop solutions that the market will want in the future. Von Hippel argues that a user-centered innovation process – one that harnesses lead users – offers great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation model that has been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. One of the important findings of von Hippel is the prevalence of user innovation over manufacturing centric innovation, in every phase of the history of industrial evolution, yet there is a clear evolution towards more and more autonomy of the user, enabled by the growth of collaborative platforms.
53 von Hippel, Eric. Democratizing Innovation. The MIT Press, 2005. http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=citeulike0920&path=ASIN/0262002744. 54 http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2008/05/chapter-5-the-r.html 55 http://www.gene-watch.org/genewatch/articles/18-1Hope.html 56 http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2008/05/chapter-5-the-r.html 60